William Edgar Borah was an outspoken Republican U.S. Senator from Idaho. He served from 1907 until his death in 1940. He was distantly related to Katharina von Bora, the Catholic nun who left her convent in the 16th century and married reformer Martin Luther.
About William Borah in brief
William Edgar Borah was an outspoken Republican U.S. Senator from Idaho. He served from 1907 until his death in 1940. Borah is often considered an isolationist, because he led the Irreconcilables, senators who would not accept the Treaty of Versailles. In his final years, he felt he might be able to settle differences in Europe by meeting with Hitler; though he did not go, this has not enhanced his historical reputation. His statue, presented by the state of Idaho in 1947, stands in the National Statuary Hall Collection. He was distantly related to Katharina von Bora, the Catholic nun who left her convent in the 16th century and married reformer Martin Luther. His Borah ancestors came to America in about 1760, fought in the Revolutionary War, and moved west with the frontier. His parents were farmers Elizabeth and William Nathan Borah. He studied at the University of Kansas and became a lawyer in that state before seeking greater opportunities in Idaho. In 1887 he began working as a teacher, but his plans were scuttled when he contracted tuberculosis. He had to return to his home in Lyons, where he nursed his sister to health and nursed him back to health. He died in 1940; his statue, given by theState of Idaho to his sister Sue, stood in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she was married to her husband, Anselley, an attorney. He is buried in the Las Vegas City Cemetery, near the town of Litchfield, Idaho, with his wife and three children.
He also had a son, William E., who was a lawyer and served in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1896 to 1903. He and Wesley Jones debated as schoolboys in Washington, D.C., and would later represent Washington in Congress. He ran for president in 1936, but party regulars were not inclined to allow a longtime maverick to head the ticket. His son William E. was the seventh of ten children, and the third son of Elizabeth Borah, a farmer from Jasper Township, Illinois, and her second husband, William N. Bora. He went on to become a prominent lawyer in Kansas and later served as a judge in the Kansas Supreme Court. He later became a member of the Idaho Supreme Court and served as the state’s chief justice. He became one of the progressive insurgents who challenged President William Howard Taft’s policies, though Borah refused to support former president Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party bid against Taft in 1912. In the Senate, Borah reluctantly voted for war in 1917 and, once it concluded, he fought against the Versaille treaty, and the Senate did not ratify it. He often fought with the Republican presidents in office between 1921 and 1933, though Coolidge offered to make Borah his running mate in 1924. In 1928 Borah campaigned for Hoover in 1928, something he rarely did for presidential candidates and never did again.
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This page is based on the article William Borah published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
